


A Crossing of Paths

by themerrygentleman



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-01
Updated: 2013-07-01
Packaged: 2017-12-16 18:12:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/865063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themerrygentleman/pseuds/themerrygentleman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dairine Callahan runs into an old friend in a Crossings bar, and a debt is repaid--with an awful lot of running along the way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Crossing of Paths

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SeerowsKindness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeerowsKindness/gifts).



> Well, here we are! This was written in a bit of a rush, I fear, and got a lot longer than I'd originally intended. I basically ended up writing an entire episode of Doctor Who, come to think of it. At least I've got quantity!
> 
> In any case, Dairine Callahan is an incredibly fun character to write. Thank you so much for the excellent prompts!

_A Crossing of Paths_

  
At precisely seven o’clock on the morning of May twentieth, the little silvery laptop on Dairine Callahan’s bedside table started playing an exceptionally loud rendition of Star Wars’ Imperial March.

From the midst of the tangle of blankets a few feet away, a hidden form stirred slightly. From it emanated a vocalization which, while it had no precise translation in either English or the Speech, was clearly meant to express an emphatic negative.

  
The laptop’s only response was to switch to _Also Sprach Zarathustra_.

  
“Don’t wake me up until lunchtime at _least_ , Spot,” the muffled voice insisted. “Seriously, what the hell? I’m off school for the summer now, and Nelaid doesn’t want me on Wellakh until 5:30 our time.”

  
_I am aware of your instructions, but you have received a transmission flagged ‘urgent’ from the Motherboard_ , Spot said, without pausing its song.

  
“What do you mean? I’m permanently linked to the Motherboard; I would have noticed right away if the mobiles tried to contact me.”

  
_I believe you underestimate the depth of your unconsciousness at the beginning of any summer vacation_ , Spot replied, with a mechanical chuckle. A moment later, _Also Sprach Zarathustra_ thundered to its enthusiastic conclusion, as though the music was agreeing.

  
Dairine threw a pillow at her computer, but reluctantly got out of bed. “Fine, what’s the message?”

  
_Message begins: Dairine, the imaging team has discovered an anomaly at the Crossings Intercontinual Gating Facility on Rirhath B that may be relevant to your interests. We have arranged a ‘shortcut’ gating that you may activate at your convenience should you wish to investigate in person. Further documentation on the anomaly is attached. Message ends._

  
Dairine blinked in surprise, already beginning to sense the latent wizardly energy of the ‘shortcut’ gating (a construct not unlike the worldgate in Carmela’s closet) attached to the message. All of this was highly unusual—while the mobiles did contact her on occasion, her link with their planet was usually limited to the mental ‘background radiation’ that reached her subconsciously. Furthermore, worldgates were a tricky business, and sending her a prearranged one would have taken no small amount of wizardly energy. Whatever the imaging team had discovered, it would have to be a pretty big deal for them to set all of this up, she mused.

  
Dairine yawned, rummaging through her chest of drawers in search of a clean T-shirt. “All right, Spot, this is weird. Let’s have the documentation they attached, okay?”

  
Spot grew a set of spidery legs, scuttled around to face the nearest wall, and flipped open, projecting a square of light onto the small patch of blank space not covered with Star Wars posters. A moment later, the square resolved into a video with the imaging team’s usual crisp resolution, a constant string of characters in the Speech running around its borders: a view of some hallway or other in the Crossings. Aliens of all description bustled by in a hurry—species Dairine knew, species she’d never seen before, and at least one species that she had found herself running for her life from in the past. For the moment, nothing seemed unusual.

  
Then the video came to a sudden halt, zoomed in on a distant corner of the corridor, and started playing again, much more slowly this time. As Dairine watched, a tall, blurred humanoid silhouette ran past the wizardly ‘camera’ and was lost in the crowd a moment later.

  
“What the…” Dairine muttered, already playing through the video again. The repeat viewing yielded nothing more: just the blurry three or four seconds of someone running down a corridor.

  
“Spot, I don’t get this. Where’s the rest of it?”

  
_A caption was attached to the video, as follows: ‘Of potential interest re: balancing of accounts; tying up of loose ends, as well as recent developments at the Crossings.’ Also, the ‘shortcut’ gating terminates in the same hallway in the Crossings Intercontinual Gating Facility where this footage was filmed._

  
“Yeah, yeah, but the imaging team has more visual on whoever this person is, right?” Dairine asked.

  
_Negative._

  
Dairine started pacing around the room. “That’s ridiculous! They see everything, that’s their job! And ever since the mobiles figured out how to draw energy from alternate universes, there shouldn’t be any issues with powering the spell…”

  
_Presumably the elusive nature of the individual in question is one factor that makes him or her of potential interest_ , Spot pointed out, skittering off of the table to land with a bounce on Dairine’s mattress.

  
Dairine paused. “Wait a minute…you don’t think that this has anything to do with…” She hesitated for a moment.

  
_Your search for Roshaun?_ Spot supplied knowingly. _Unclear._ _It is probably useless to speculate without the benefit of firsthand experience._

  
Dairine nodded vehemently. Less than two minutes later, she had finished getting dressed (and done a quick wizardry to tie her shoelaces in a hurry), had stuffed a backpack with Spot and a few of her other wizardly essentials, and was reading through the twenty syllables needed to activate the mobiles’ ‘shortcut.’ At the fifteenth syllable, there was a knock on the door.

  
“Dair, you’d better get downstairs in a hurry if you want any breakfast,” said Nita’s voice. “Kit is over here, the two of us have spent the past several hours arguing with a volcano, and if you don’t put in a prompt appearance, _we are going to eat all of the waffles_.”

  
Dairine grinned, relishing the familiar feeling of being one up on her sister. “Take ‘em all,” she replied, starting to say the last five syllables of the activation spell in her mind. “I’m having breakfast on Rirhath B.”

  
“Wait, what…”

  
“Say hi to your boyfriend for me,” said Dairine, and turned the spell loose. A moment later, nothing remained in her room but the usual clutter, and a series of Star Wars posters fluttering with the sudden displacement of air.

  
*

  
A moment later and untold fathoms of space away, Dairine materialized at the Crossings, in the same hallway that the imaging team had shown her. The place was as busy as ever with the commerce and travel of a thousand different worlds, and she quickly fell into step with the considerable foot traffic so as to avoid being overrun.

  
The corridor in which she found herself was unremarkable for the Crossings—a vast, arched ceiling overhead, a polished concourse floor stretching off into the distance, and neon signage in all manner of languages flickering all around her. As she surveyed her surroundings further, however, Dairine began to notice a few unusual details. An oddly high number of green-uniformed Crossings security officers were bustling about, all looking vaguely harassed, and a series of yellow lights set along the wall were dimly pulsing in a regular pattern.

  
_Low-level alarm_ , Dairine realized. _Something’s up, all right. Time to talk to Sker’ret_.

  
She hitched her backpack higher on her shoulders and took off at a run. A few minutes later, she had made her way to the vast main concourse of the Crossings, its floor covered in blazing, shimmering rainbows reflected from the stained-glass ceilings. With the practiced ease of a regular traveler, Dairine pushed through the crowds and reached the center of the concourse, where there stood a little metallic kiosk. In the kiosk—no, around it—no, over it—was a very rapidly moving Rirhait, clearly in a state of stress that was dangerously close to panic.

  
“Dai Stihó, Sker’!” Dairine told the Rirhait brightly.

  
Sker’ret poured himself through the bars of the kiosk and scuttled up to Dairine. “Dai, Cousin,” he greeted her wearily. “What brings you here today? Just a social call, or are you on errantry?”

  
“I’m not sure which, to be honest,” Dairine admitted, glancing at the Stationmaster’s kiosk. It was lit up like Christmas—glowing signage in the angular Rirhait script flashed urgently for attention from all directions, and a chorus of alert chimes was rising from every available surface. “Busy day?”

  
“You have no idea,” Sker’ret told her. “It’s a busy season anyway—this is vacation time for a hundred different species, and the height of business hours for a hundred more—but the Crossings is having serious maintenance problems. We’ve been having these power fluctuations lately. Anything might turn off for a few minutes, or a few hours, and we can’t track what’s causing it. A piece of the ceiling even fell down yesterday. We don’t know if it’s related, but the worldgates are getting much harder to manage, too. And on top of all that, we’ve had…well, an _intruder_ in several of the classified-access areas of the Crossings.”

  
“An intruder?” Dairine asked incredulously. “I never show up here on a quiet day, do I?”

  
“I’m starting to think that quiet days are a mythical concept, Cousin,” Sker’ret replied. “Whoever it was set off all sorts of alarms, but we haven’t found them yet, which is unusual in and of itself. We have no idea if this has anything to do with the power outages, but…” He waved a few claws in the air in a helpless gesture.

  
“Well, some associates of mine directed my attention to the Crossings this morning,” Dairine told him. “The intruder wouldn’t happen to have been sighted at these coordinates, would he?” She rattled off the numbers that denoted the location where the mobiles had sent her.

  
Sker’ret’s eyestalks twirled around in an energetic manner, a motion Dairine had learned to associate with a human raising his or her eyebrows in surprise. “In point of fact, that was where one of the alarms went off,” he told her. “There are a lot of auxiliary power connectors behind the walls of that walkway, and we had an attempted access. This is interesting news, indeed…”

  
“No coincidences, right?”

  
“I hope not,” Sker’ret agreed. “Let me know if you find anything relevant, will you?”

  
Dairine nodded. “And, hey, give yourself a break one of these days and swing by our place. My dad has been setting his old magazines aside for you for a while now.”

  
Sker’ret clicked his mandibles together hungrily. “I’ll be there whenever I have a moment of freedom, Cousin. All my best to Nita and Kit and Carmela!”

  
Dairine grinned and wandered away from the Stationmaster’s kiosk, not entirely certain where to look next. The Crossings was an unfathomably vast facility—it could be seen form orbit and had its own government—and her only clue had been the coordinates the mobiles had given her. Wizardly business had taken Dairine through the Crossings more times than she could count, but all the same, she had probably only explored a tiny fraction of its depths.

  
She wandered from one corridor to the next, her eyes flickering through the crowds of alien travelers in search of anything that seemed out-of place. The panorama before her remained resolutely normal, though, and she found herself gritting her teeth in frustration.

  
_Can’t you give me a hint or something?_ she demanded of the Powers, the mobiles, and the universe in general. _I gave up chocolate chip waffles for this, and I still have no idea what I’m supposed to find. At this rate, I’m going to find Roshaun before I find whatever it is you want…_

  
_Roshaun…_

  
No sooner had the name crossed her mind than a flood of barely-repressed emotions crashed over her, making her stumble in her stride. The greatest friend she had ever known was gone, had been gone for months now, and even Dairine’s boundless determination was on the verge of failing her. Since that fateful night on the Moon, Dairine had talked to every Advisory or Senior wizard she knew, had visited obscure corners of distant planets, had frantically scanned the pages of her Manual until the words all blurred together, all in the hope of finding the smallest clue to Roshaun’s fate—and had gotten nothing for her troubles but exhaustion. She still remembered the dizzying thrill of her first few days as a wizard, the belief that wizardry could rewrite any rule, solve any problem…and now, she faced a problem that even wizardry didn’t seem able to solve.

  
_What is wrong with all this? Am I missing something? Am I not looking hard enough?_ Dairine demanded of herself, as she had on countless other mornings. _Is this my fault?_

  
A moment later, she shook her head vehemently, furious with herself. _Stop thinking like that,_ she told herself furiously. _Wishing isn’t going to bring him back. All you’re doing is making things harder for yourself. Now get on with the work that needs doing…whatever it is._

  
*

  
Blinking a few times to clear her mind, Dairine glanced around her again. She hadn’t been paying attention to her surroundings for a while, and in that time, she had wandered into a side area of the Crossings, a corridor about the size of Grand Central Station. There were no worldgates here—the space was devoted exclusively to shops, restaurants, lounges, and other, more alien amenities.

  
She stopped walking, brought to a halt by a sudden feeling of nostalgia. The last time Dairine had been to this corridor, she had been chased into it, running for her life from a band of vicious alien mercenaries. She had been a brand-new and very frightened wizard, then, armed with a computer Manual she didn’t understand and thrust into a battle she hadn’t realized she was signed up for. It was only due to some timely assistance from a complete stranger that she had escaped this corridor with her life.

  
“Was it really just a few years ago?” Dairine muttered aloud, noticing the conspicuously bright patches of floor all around her—the places where tiles had been replaced, due to damage from blaster fire. Aside from that one, subtle sign of past events, however, she might has well have gone back in time to the day it had all happened. The bustling crowds of alien commuters were just the same, the brightly jeweled ceiling shifted in the same mesmerizing, kaleidoscope-like motions, and Dairine herself stood there once again, Spot tucked under one arm, with no idea where she was going or what to do once she got there.

  
Whether it was simple memory or some deeper instinct that drew her, Dairine was unsure, but it wasn’t long before she found herself walking into the same nondescript bar that she had run blindly into two years before.

  
*

  
The place hadn’t changed much. It was still dimly lit, its walls bedecked with Rirhait modern art, and filled with travelers of all description. The thing with all the eyes was still there, nursing a drink in the same corner as Dairine remembered—evidently, even after all this time, it was still a regular. The bar did, however, seem to be rather more crowded than usual. A large group at the front of the bar appeared to be engaged in a rowdy drinking contest of some description, involving large glasses of a translucent, bright red liquid.

  
“Klabnian fire teas,” said a voice behind her, suddenly. “Not very alcoholic, but oh, they’ve got a burn to them. Spicier than anything else in the galaxy! I think someone might have dared them.”

  
Dairine wheeled around, blinking in surprise—for the voice had spoken, not in the Speech, but in English with a pronounced Northern English accent. Its owner waved at her, grinning, from the nearest table—a tall, short-haired man in a battered leather jacket, with a distinctly mischievous look in his eyes.

  
While human wizards used the Crossings on business every day, bumping into one in a bar was still a rather unusual occurrence—and after all, Dairine reminded herself, There Are No Coincidences was about as close to an unbreakable law as the universe ever got. “Dai Stihó,” she told the stranger. “What brings you here?”

  
“Oh, just passing through,” he informed her blithely. “Taking in the local sights, that sort of thing. Not a wizard, though, sorry—although I think you could say we’re in the same business.”

  
This completely threw Dairine for a loop. “But…I mean…the Earth is sevarfrith. How else would you get here, if not with a worldgate?”

  
“I’ve got a ship parked outside,” the stranger answered. “And actually, I’m not from Earth. Not to worry; it’s a common mistake.”

  
The next moment, he frowned thoughtfully, setting down his drink and looking at Dairine more closely. “But hang on a moment—we’ve met before, haven’t we? You look…familiar.”

  
Dairine frowned, racking her memory for where she might have seen the stranger before. She had met countless wizards and aliens over the course of the past few years, but as far as she could recall, he wasn’t among them. “Sorry, I’m not sure if—“

  
“No, hang on, I’ve got it!” His face lit up suddenly. “It was right here, in this bar. You were running from someone, and I told you to go hide in one of the alien bathrooms.” He chuckled to himself. “How did that all turn out for you, anyway? I’m glad to see you survived.”

  
“I…I’m sorry, what?” Dairine shook her head, now utterly perplexed. Her memory of that incident was vivid, and there would have been no mistaking the man who had saved her—he had been young, blond, and dressed in a white vest and a long brown jacket. The man who was now sitting across the table from her, staring at her expectantly, bore absolutely no resemblance to her mysterious savior.

  
“Oh, I should probably explain,” the stranger told her. “I’m a Time Lord. Our species has a little trick—we undergo complete cellular regeneration in times of mortal danger. I wouldn’t have looked like this last time we met—this is a new face; I’m only just breaking it in. You were—let’s see…before the bloke with the umbrella, but after the one with the funny scarf…hmm…was I blond? Looked a bit like a cricket player?”

  
Dairine nodded, scarcely daring to believe it. “It’s…is that really you?”

  
_It would seem to be possible_ , Spot told her silently. _Preliminary scans indicate that this individual possesses a binary vascular system, as did the individual you met in this bar two years previously. Additionally, the process of cellular regeneration he describes has been documented in several different sentient species_.

  
The man in the leather jacket reached an arm out across the table and shook her hand. “Hello. I’m the Doctor.”

  
“Dairine Callahan,” she responded automatically, not sure what else to say.

  
“Pleased to meet you, Dairine,” the Doctor told her, beaming once more. “Well, properly, I mean. And what brings you to the Crossings today? Commute? Bit of shopping?”

  
“Actually…” Dairine’s mind was racing, thinking back to the mobiles’ message. What was the phrase they had used? ‘Of potential interest re: balancing of accounts; tying up of loose ends.’

  
“I think the people who sent me here might have meant for me to run into you,” she told the Doctor hesitantly. “I don’t know how many wizards you’ve met, but our Art is all about balance. Power that’s borrowed from the universe has to be repaid, favors have to be returned, that sort of thing. You saved my life two years ago, so…maybe I’m supposed to help you with something this time.”

  
He nodded slowly. “Fantastic! As it would happen--” he lowered his voice and leaned towards her, his expression taking on a conspiratorial air—“I’m taking something of a busman’s holiday at the moment. I’m traveling with someone these days, but it’s her mum’s birthday today, and…” his expression briefly shifted to one of abject terror—“I wouldn’t like my chances if I was responsible for her missing _that_ party. So I dropped by the Crossings to catch up with some old friends, but there’s something strange going on here. I’ve been investigating.”

  
All of a sudden, Dairine noticed something curious: several Crossings security officers, with their distinctive silvery green uniforms, had walked purposefully into the bar while the Doctor was speaking. Perhaps, she reasoned, they were making routine investigations because of the various alerts and power outages, but surely it would only take one officer to check a bar of this size?

  
The Doctor followed her gaze and noticed the security officers, two of whom were starting to wander nonchalantly towards their table. “Ah,” he muttered. “I was afraid that might happen.”

  
“What? It’s just Crossings security…”

  
“Yeah, well…” the Doctor’s expression turned sheepish. “I _may_ have set off a few security alerts while I was investigating. I was hiding in this bar, actually…the Crossings isn’t too fond of me. They locked me up for five hours the last time we met!”

  
“I could talk to them…” Dairine started, then trailed off. Despite being friends with Sker’ret, she didn’t have the best record with Crossings security, either—she had been involved in more than one blaster fight on the premises in the past, with plenty of collateral damage, and had blown up a Satrachi mercenary not fifty feet from where she was currently sitting.

  
“I’ve got a better idea,” the Doctor told her, standing up. “RUN!”

  
And with that, he bolted, tossing his glass of iced tea into the air as he went. The beverage exploded on the floor a moment later, in a spray of glass shards and ice cubes, and one of the advancing security officers immediately tripped over the whole mess and went skidding into a nearby table. The chaos that ensued immediately afterward looked like it had the potential to turn into a fully-fledged bar brawl, but Dairine didn’t stick around to find out. She ducked past a startled, nine-foot-tall extraterrestrial and out the door, breaking into a full-on sprint to catch up with the Doctor.

  
*

  
“Would you mind explaining exactly what’s going on here?” Dairine shouted, already gasping for breath. The Doctor, whoever he was, clearly did a lot of running; he was expertly navigating through the crowds at a truly remarkable pace.

  
“Well, that’s what I’m trying to find out,” he shot back. “It started with the power outages, but it’s a lot more than that. Worldgates are starting to go wrong—people getting stuck here, or turning up on the wrong planet. First time I tried to get here this morning, I wound up on a moon of Jupiter! And I’d like to know why.”

  
As she ran, Dairine pulled Spot out of her backpack and started typing furiously—not an easy balancing act, but a necessary one. Her first spell threw up a very basic form of invisibility around herself and the Doctor. It didn’t truly hide them from sight like the more energy-intensive spells would have, but it was enough to ensure that Crossings passerby and any pursuers would simply neglect to notice them. Dairine’s next spell was far more extensive: a wizardly ‘scan’ of the surrounding area, designed to detect anything that was out of place or unusual.

  
“Oh, I see what you’re doing there,” the Doctor told her. “Good thinking. Let me know if you find anything.”

  
Without warning, he slowed from a run to a casual stroll, just in time to duck into a store. Dairine recognized it as one of the many purveyors of intergalactic designer fashions that Carmela favored, and reluctantly followed him in.

  
She found him at the back of the store, enthusiastically browsing through a rack of rather elaborate hats. “What are you doing in here?” she asked him, bewildered.

  
“Investigating!” the Doctor told her. “One of the main server aggregates that’s been affected by whatever’s going on is right behind this wall, and this is my chance to scan it. But I need to be inconspicuous about it.” With that, he pulled a particularly extravagant neon yellow hat off of the rack and put it on. “Hmm…what do you think?”

  
“I’m not sure it’s really your color,” Dairine told him. “Need any help with the scans?”

  
“No, I’ve got that covered, thanks,” he assured her. “Let me know if your wizardry turns anything up, but what I want you to do is find someone here and talk to them. There’s one infallible rule, right across the universe—if you want to know what’s really going on, ask someone in the little shops.”

  
“Why do _you_ get the fun job?” Dairine protested.

  
“Because I’m such a fun person,” the Doctor shot back, grinning, and tried on another hat. “Go on!”

  
Rolling her eyes, Dairine wandered towards the counter. The employee behind it was a pale green Rirhait, who looked up expectantly as Dairine approached. “Hello, can I help you find anything?”

  
_Might as well just go with the direct approach_ , Dairine reasoned. “Hello, I’m on errantry and I greet you. I’m investigating the recent disturbances in the Crossings, and I was wondering if you’ve noticed anything.”

  
To Dairine’s surprise, the Rirhait immediately reared up, claws flailing, in what was clearly an exasperated shrug. “Oh, not again,” she snapped. “Look, there have been three Crossings security people in here today, all asking the same thing. I’ll tell you what I told them: Business is down a little because some travelers are hearing rumors and avoiding the Crossings, and the power has gone out in here twice. If you need any more information, look it up in the official maintenance record.”

  
Dairine frowned, not at all sure what to make of this. “All right, sorry to bother you,” she told the Rirhait, and wandered back over to the hat rack. While she’d been talking, the Doctor had abandoned his pretense of shopping and pried open a grate on the back wall. He had produced a slim metal device with a blue light at the end, resembling a small flashlight, and was waving it around the grate with a thoughtful expression.

  
“Find anything?” Dairine asked. “My wizardly scan isn’t ringing any bells, so to speak.”

  
The Doctor scowled and turned off his device. “I don’t like this,” he muttered. “I’m picking up plenty of irregularities. Pretty bad, and getting worse. Serious stuff with the worldgates, minor power outages, right down to problems with the air conditioning. But nowhere is there any sign of external access. No hacking, nobody messing with the access points except me, alerts going off besides the ones I triggered earlier. If I didn’t know better, I would say it was an inside job.”

  
Dairine shook her head. “That can’t be right. I’ve known Sker’ret for ages—he would have discovered something like that ages ago. And besides, the Crossings has been running for millennia. It’s not exactly known for being vulnerable to internal sabotage…”

  
As she spoke, Dairine was racking her memory. Something was nagging at the back of her memory, too faint for direct recognition. Something was wrong, something was out of place, something that could be the clue to this whole puzzle—

  
“So, what did they say at the counter?” the Doctor asked hopefully.

  
And as he said it, everything clicked into place, and Dairine couldn’t resist actually saying “YES!” out loud.

  
The Doctor snapped to attention, nearly knocking over the hat rack. “What? What is it?”

  
Dairine’s heart was pounding. “The lady at the desk told me that three or four Crossings security people had been in here already asking about the power failures. And when we were in the bar just now, three or four Crossings security people showed up to chase after you.”

  
The Doctor frowned. “So?”

  
Dairine threw up her hands. “Oh, come on! _So_ , Crossings security is normally a lot more unobtrusive than that. Both of the incidents I just mentioned were routine checks that should have only taken one guard to investigate. And come to think of it, I’ve been seeing a lot more green uniforms than usual running around lately.”

  
The Doctor nodded slowly, comprehension dawning on his face. “And who can get sanctioned access to all sorts of restricted control centers in the Crossings without anyone asking awkward questions? A uniformed guard.”

  
Dairine nodded breathlessly. “Bribes? Blackmail? Or impostors?”

  
“One of the three. Oh, this is it, this has to be it!” The Doctor jumped up and threw his hands in the air, knocking over the hat rack completely. “Oh, Dairine Callahan, you are _clever!_ ”

  
An unfamiliar noise reached Dairine’s ears a moment later: a slight, almost imperceptible mechanical whine. Glancing around, she spotted the source of the noise in an instant: A security camera mounted on the wall just above them, slowly adjusting its focus.

  
Dairine swore extravagantly, throwing in a Wellakhit curse that Roshaun had taught her for good measure. “Maybe I’m not _that_ clever,” she told the Doctor. “Get ready to run.”

  
*

  
In a flash, Spot was out of her backpack again, and she was typing furiously, constructing another pair of spells. The first was simple enough: with a few words in the Speech, she persuaded the camera to stop recording for the next few minutes. The next spell was substantially more complex, and she quickly recited nineteen of the twenty syllables in the Speech that it required, keeping the last back for just the right moment.

  
“I’m really sorry about all of the commotion,” she told the Rirhait behind the counter, who was regarding them with an expression of profound shock. “I’ll be back later to reimburse you for any damages. Okay, Doctor, RUN!”

  
They bolted out of the shop, and as their feet crossed the threshold, Dairine said the last syllable of her spell. A tremendous burst of light flared behind them, accompanied by prodigious quantities of smoke.

  
Dairine grinned wickedly. “There, that should stop them from figuring out which way we went. Okay, Doctor, where are we headed?”

  
“We need access to the Crossings’ main control center if we’re going to get to the bottom of this,” he responded. "Did you say you knew the Stationmaster?”

  
“Yeah, he lives in a tent in our basement sometimes. Long story. We’re actually not too far away from the Stationmaster’s kiosk…”

  
Dairine’s next words were drowned out by a sudden and overwhelming explosion of sound—a crashing noise that seemed to come from everywhere at once and yet nowhere specific, loud enough to make the floor shake. A moment later, every light in the Crossings went out, leaving the two of them in utter darkness.

  
Dairine stumbled to a halt, just barely stopping herself from running into the Doctor. As the echoes of the crash died, a chorus of shocked exclamations filled the air—thousands of Crossings travelers stumbling, falling, or simply wondering what the hell was going on. A few bioluminescent species provided scattered patches of light, but for all intents and purposes, complete blackness had fallen over the Crossings.

  
Dairine reached out with the same wizardly scan she’d been using earlier, but found only silence. “This is a complete shutdown,” she muttered aloud, scarcely believing it even as she said it.

  
“Right,” the Doctor said grimly. “Thank God the systems that hold up the ceiling aren’t on the same network, or we’d all be in a lot of trouble. Well, even more trouble, I mean.”

  
Without warning, a spotlight snapped on directly above them. Dairine yelled and threw her arm in front of her eyes at the sudden brilliance. A moment later, the first spotlight was joined by another, then a third, until Dairine and the Doctor were standing in the middle of a vast, illuminated circle.

  
Around the perimeter of that circle, three Crossings Security hovercraft touched down, and a full battalion of green-uniformed guards spilled out of them. Within seconds, they were surrounded.

  
“Put your hands in the air!” a voice boomed over a loudspeaker. “You’re under arrest, under suspicion of being responsible for this power outage.”

  
“Oh. Right. Here comes even more trouble,” the Doctor muttered, rummaging around in the pockets of his leather jacket. After a moment, he produced a battered leather case holding a seemingly blank piece of paper, which he held up to the advancing security forces. “Okay, you lot, there’s no need for alarm. I’m supposed to be here. I think you’ll find that…OOF!”

  
The nearest guard had tackled him to the floor in midsentence, and the rest were rapidly closing in. “Run, Dairine!” the Doctor told her, an unmistakable note of desperation in his voice. “Get to the control center!”

  
Dairine hesitated, not sure whether to run or start in with the combat wizardries. What sort of wizard would she be if she ran away when someone else needed her most?

  
“Go on, I’ll be fine!” the Doctor told her. “I’ve been through much worse in my time. But things are going to get a lot worse if you don’t get to the control center NOW!”

  
Dairine bit her lip, but as the guards closed in, she gave in and ran. Several of them made a grab for her, but Dairine had years of experience in running from various people and entities, and before long she had disappeared into the darkness.

  
*

  
The run to the Stationmaster’s kiosk was a harrowing one. Deprived of vision by the darkness, Dairine had to rely on her wizardly perception to guide her through a vast maze of corridors, all of them filled with panicking interstellar travelers. Although she was well aware that she wouldn’t see anything, she still couldn’t help glancing back over her shoulder as she ran—whether she expected to see pursuing security guards or the Doctor miraculously returning, she wasn’t sure.

  
After a while, the darkness around her started to seem like more than a simple absence of light. It was pressing, ominous, overpowering—a shadow of the ancient Darkness that she had encountered too many times in the past. _You couldn’t save the Doctor_ , an awful voice seemed to be telling her out of those shadows, a burning chill in its words. _No, worse than that—you brought this on him in the first place. You couldn’t leave well enough alone, couldn’t let a chance encounter go, you dragged him into your little escapade and look where it got you both. But then, that’s what you **do,** isn’t it?_

  
The voice grew still more venomous, putting a deliberate and cruel emphasis on every syllable. _You blunder into situations you don’t understand and ruin lives everywhere you go, counting on your raw power as a brash young wizard to get you out of it alive. Have you ever considered that things are often much better off before you decide to intervene? You were offered the Oath because the Powers had need of your youthful levels of wizardly energy, nothing more. All of the fine words about guarding growth and easing pain—you rushed through them like formalities, and you have **never** understood any of those qualities or their consequences. You’re a blunt instrument, with delusions of some great capability to fix every problem. How many deaths will it take before you realize this, I wonder?_

  
_This is Roshaun all over again._

  
_You’re abandoning people because you haven’t the slightest clue how to save them, over and over again._

  
_All you care about is your own way of doing things, and everyone suffers for it._

  
_It’s all your fault._

  
_All your fault._

  
Always.

  
And in the depths of the darkness, Dairine recognized the voice for what it was, and despaired—for it was not the Lone Power’s, but her own.

  
A moment later, she ran right into the Stationmaster’s kiosk, bounced off of the unyielding bluesteel, and crashed to the ground. As she looked up, dizzily, she noticed that had she not been distracted, she would have seen the kiosk instantly—it was an island of brightness in the midst of the oblivion, lit up with its usual array of blinking consoles. _It must have an emergency generator_ , Dairine realized, getting shakily back to her feet.

  
“Sker’ret?” she hazarded, fighting to keep her voice steady and not sound too frightened. “Are you there?”

  
“Dairine?” A Rirhait silhouette emerged from the depths of the kiosk. “What in the Powers’ names is going on here?”

  
“I’m not exactly sure,” Dairine admitted. “I was hoping you’d know.”

  
“Well, obviously we’ve had a catastrophic systems failure,” Sker’ret said, giving one of the consoles an irritated whack with his nearest few legs. “And I’m completely locked out here; this is starting to feel more and more like a deliberate attack. I just wish I knew why…”

  
“I just escaped from Crossings security,” Dairine told him. “We…I mean _I_ suspect that some of them aren’t who they say they are, and have been doing something with the main control center.”

  
Sker’ret froze, and started growling—a noise Dairine had never heard him make before. “I might have known,” he said, furiously. “I might have known! All this time I’ve been up to my eyestalks in the technical details, working out all of the glitches, keeping things running—I haven’t been paying enough attention to my personnel. My father always said I was too trusting! Come on!”

  
Sker’ret poured himself out of the kiosk and started scuttling away, generating a wizardly light that bobbed along behind him. Dairine took off after him, glad that she’d at least had a moment to catch her breath.

  
*

  
Moving confidently through the darkness, Sker’ret led her to a door in the side of a wall, labeled RESTRICTED ACCESS in large letters. It had been locked, but Dairine had a few words with the door, and a moment later they were inside. The two of them fumbled down one flight of stairs, then another, and finally emerged in a spacious underground chamber.

  
Unlike the rest of the Crossings at the moment, it was illuminated, albeit sparsely. Towers of machinery filled most of the room—some were recognizably servers or power generators, but most were of a more alien design. A small army of Crossings security guards were moving back and forth through this mechanical forest, adjusting settings and typing commands—and the Doctor was shackled to a nearby console, glaring defiantly at all of them.

  
“Oh, good, you’re here,” he said as Dairine and Sker'ret entered. “I’m afraid that we may be in a bit of a predicament.”

  
“What, more of you?” another voice asked—in English, to Dairine’s surprise. “Well, you’re too late now, I’m afraid.”

  
One of the security guards stepped forward to face them, clicking his fingers as he did so. He had been a tall, vaguely amphibian-seeming alien, but as he stepped forward his entire body began to shimmer like a mirage. By the time he reached Sker’ret and Dairine, he was human: a completely unremarkable-looking middle-aged man in a business suit, regarding them with an expression of profound smugness.

  
“I am on errantry, and I greet you,” Dairine told him, immediately wondering if she should have opted for a less polite wizardly greeting. “What are you doing here, and what have you done to the Crossings?”

  
The stranger’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “I think I should ask you what you’re doing here,” he replied. “What’s a teenage girl doing on an alien planet? Until we caught this guy—“ he gestured towards the Doctor—“we thought we were the only humans here. But it’s a lucky coincidence for you, anyway. You get a front-row seat to the greatest step forward humans have taken since the invention of the wheel…”

  
“It’s not going to work, you know,” the Doctor told him, glowering. “Something happens at the Crossings, and before long the whole galaxy knows about it. Do you honestly think that you can get away with taking the place over with a thousand species watching you?”

  
“That, sir, is precisely why this is going to work,” said another voice. A second guard stepped forward, abandoning her disguise to reveal an austere-looking woman with iron-colored hair and a matching expression. “We have been undercover in this facility long enough to learn everything there is to know about the function of these worldgates. We now hold all of the cards. The Crossings has been sealed off completely, meaning that the thousands of aliens that are here now will enter or leave only when we say so. This, as you can imagine, translates to substantial bargaining power.”

  
“Hostages?” Dairine spluttered. “You really think you can take over the Crossings by holding hostages? Stay right where you are, and I’ll name you a hundred different ways that’s going to blow up in your face…”

  
“Oh, but that’s just the beginning of it,” interrupted the man in the suit, a slightly manic glint entering his eyes. “Just imagine—as far as most people on Earth are concerned, it’s still up for debate whether we’re alone in the universe or not. And then, along comes…this.” He waved his arms around him in an expansive gesture that seemed meant to indicate the whole of Rirhath B . “Millions of species, and a doorway to millions of other planets. In one hour, all major government agencies on Earth are going to receive an invitation from us to come up and take a look. And who’s going to be at the controls when they get here? Their fellow human beings, ready and waiting to usher them into a new dawn.”

  
Dairine rolled her eyes, trying to look as unimpressed as possible. “Why not just say ‘Power! UNLIMITED POWER!’ and be done with it?”

  
To her utter infuriation, the man in the suit smiled at her, with a supremely patronizing look. “Don’t worry about it,” he told her. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand the implications of it all.”

  
“I have just summoned the _real_ representatives of Crossings Security, as well as most of the maintenance staff, to this location,” Sker’ret informed the humans frostily. “As the senior operative here present, I believe it falls to me to read you your rights.”

  
“Oh, but I don’t think they’ll be arriving after the side trip I just sent them on,” a third human told him, throwing off his Crossings-guard disguise to join the first two. “We control the worldgates now, remember? I hope that your minions like the weather on Alpha Centauri’s first planet.”

  
Sker’ret froze, growling again, and even the Doctor went pale.

  
Dairine, meanwhile, had decided that enough was really enough. She reached out with her mind, producing one of the ‘shorthand’ spells that she used often—a simple access to an otherspace pocket in which she typically stored snacks and wizardly components for long journeys. The same pocket, she decided, would be sufficient to hold the false security guards, until she decided what to do with them.

  
Sker’ret, though, glanced over at her with a clear expression of alarm. “If you’re thinking of trying a wizardry, Cousin, please don’t! There are all sorts of delicate machines in here, radiating all sorts of energies—it’s a very unstable environment. If the spell reacts oddly with something, it could render all of this permanently nonfunctional.”

  
Dairine bit her lip, glowering at the intruders in utter frustration. Once again, she found herself in the situation she hated more than anything—standing there, unable to do anything, while the world went to pieces around her. _Come on, Dairine, your power rating isn’t all there is to you, you’ve got to be able to do something…_

  
Suddenly, a memory reached her, a moment from her first, most terrifying days as a wizard, just after she’d met the Doctor for the first time. A barred spiral galaxy rising, filling the horizon with glorious fire; the cool, glassy surface of a planet like no other; an endless string of zeroes and ones filling Spot’s keyboard.  
And an instant later, Dairine knew what she had to do.

  
“Spot,” she said, her voice already shaky at the thought of what was about to happen, “Link my consciousness directly to the worldgating core, just like the time I was connected to the Motherboard.”

  
_Triple confirmation required_ , Spot said, sounding unnerved.

  
“This again? Yeah, fine, three times, I get the consequences. Just do it!”

  
One millisecond later, everything went blank.

  
*

  
Dairine’s mind was everywhere and nowhere at once, broken into a million pieces and scattered on the wind. Connecting to the Motherboard, two years ago, had been one thing—but the Motherboard had been a newly awakened artificial intelligence, just taking its first steps. The Crossings worldgating core, on the other hand, was a centuries-old, stunningly complex array, and it was all Dairine could do to keep conscious in the midst of the ocean of information flooding through her.

  
_Keep it together, Dairine. You can do this. You’ve done it before._

  
She fought the torrent of feedback, concentrating until it felt like her mind was screaming with the effort. And then, her vision began to open up…

  
All at once, Dairine saw the Crossings not as it appeared, but as it really was: a massive, shifting network of stabilized worldgates, kept in delicate and painstaking balance with one another, like planets in orbit. And yet, they could be rearranged in infinite combinations, by someone who knew how…

  
…and right now, with the crossroads of a whole galaxy under her command, there was very little that Dairine Callahan did not know.

  
She reached out, and an active worldgate appeared under the feet of the smug-looking man in the suit. He didn’t even have time to cry out before he was gone—transported to one of the Crossings’ highest-security holding cells. The severe-looking woman beside him was next, and then the rest of the false security guards, one by one—all of them materializing into the same cell, halfway across the Crossings.

  
Next, Dairine reached out to the poor, agitated machines that they had left behind, returning settings to normal, calming down overheated processors, and repairing the damage that the humans had clumsily inflicted in their attempts to seize power. _Truly_ , she thought, _a little knowledge is a dangerous thing._

  
A moment later, the Doctor disappeared, his shackles clattering emptily to the floor. He reappeared next to Sker’ret less than three seconds later, glancing about in utter bewilderment. The security team that Sker’ret had summoned began to materialize around him, pulled back to their rightful place from halfway across the galaxy.

  
_Well, that’s that over with_ , Dairine told herself with satisfaction, and attempted to disengage from the core…

  
…and found that she couldn’t. The flow of information was too much, too powerful, and trying to shake herself loose from it was like swimming against a thundering current. As the seconds ticked by, each feeling like an eternity, Dairine began to feel less human and more machine. Little by little, she was truly _becoming_ the Crossings, her consciousness being seamlessly absorbed into the vast architecture of the worldgating matrix.

  
And yet, even as the last vestiges of conscious thought began to slip away from her, Dairine felt no regret. What remained of her felt only pride, and satisfaction, at having finally managed to avert a disaster, to do something when it really mattered…

  
…and then, to her immense surprise, she was lying on the floor of the control center again, her head spinning, the Doctor and Sker’ret bending over her anxiously.

  
“What…happened?” she asked them. She was scarcely able to form even two words from all of the chaos in her mind, but all the same, she registered that the Doctor and Sker’ret were both grinning.

  
“We pulled your consciousness out of the worldgating matrix,” the Doctor told her.

  
“Which wasn’t easy,” Sker’ret pointed out.

  
“Right, no need to thank us or anything,” said the Doctor. “Complicated machine, that. But fortunately, my sonic screwdriver can do more than just scan for irregularities…”

  
“…and there aren’t many problems I can’t solve with the Crossings back under my command,” Sker’ret finished. “I can’t thank you enough, Cousin—that could have turned exceedingly nasty. Whoever those people were, they had a plan.”

  
“Yeah, and I’d like to know who they were,” the Doctor agreed. “They sounded like just ordinary people, but if that’s true, then where did they get those shapechange disguises? Or how did they learn to use the worldgates? Or even get to the Crossings without wizardry, in the first place?”

  
He chuckled, shaking his head. “That’s humanity for you—go to the farthest reaches of the universe, and you’ll find them there, sticking their noses into the cookie jar. Still, I’m glad you put a stop to that before they started babbling to Earth about the Crossings. I’ve still got my hands full from the _last_ time there was major alien activity in the twenty-first century…”

  
Dairine got slowly back to her feet, her whole body still shaking from the experience of connecting to the Crossings. “Well, Sker’, I hope you can tie up all of the loose ends. I hate to say it, but I think I need a break.”

  
*

  
“So, I guess I still owe you one,” Dairine told the Doctor some hours later. The two of them had spent the better part of the afternoon helping Sker’ret and his associates sort out the chaos that the impostors had caused. At last, things seemed to be on the right track back to “normal,” and so the two of them were out under Rirhath B’s summer sky, heading for one of the Crossings’ parking lots.

  
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” the Doctor told her affably. “You saved me; you saved the Crossings. I just helped reel you back in. Why bother keeping track of it all?”

  
Dairine had to smile at that—considering how much time she spent worrying about the price of every wizardry, she had to admit that this was a refreshing attitude. “Right. So where are you headed now?”

  
The Doctor shrugged expansively, his eyes scanning the diverse rows of vehicles in the parking lot. “Oh, I dunno. Jackie Tyler’s birthday isn’t over yet, so I’ll want to steer clear of Earth for a little while. Of course, I could just take the TARDIS forward a day, but I hate using time travel for something so utilitarian…”

  
Dairine stared at him. “Say that last part again.”

  
“Oh, yes!” the Doctor said, nodding happily at a large blue box in the corner of the lot—one that resembled an unusually colored phone booth more than anything else. “I’m a time traveler. This box can travel anywhere in space and time you want to go, and no dealing with the traffic at the Crossings. Didn’t I mention?”

  
Dairine shot him the challenging look that had made so many teachers quail in the past, but she was barely managing to conceal a grin beneath it. “All right, prove it.”

  
The Doctor paused, seeming to consider the idea for a moment. Then…

  
“All right, why not? After all this, I’d say we’ve both earned the right to a day off. Hop in!”

  
He pushed the door open, and Dairine got a glimpse of a vast, golden interior, far larger than the outside of the box suggested. “All right,” she told the Doctor, “Let’s go see some more of the universe.”

  
Less than a minute later, the police box, the Time Lord, and the young wizard had all vanished from Rirhath B.


End file.
